In front of the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had to explain why President Trump’s photo appears in image searches for the word “idiot.” Almost immediately, and quite predictably, millions of people tried to find out for themselves.

“Idiot” was searched more than two million times on Tuesday, according to Google Trends. The next most popular searches included “Nancy Pilosi,” “Kathie Lee Gifford,” “Meghan Markle” and “Krispy Kreme,” each with about 200,000 queries.

Advertisement

To a group of representatives, several of whom wanted help with their iPhones, Pichai attempted to explain the coding behind the search engine.

“Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of [websites’] pages in our index. And we take the keyword and match it against their pages and rank them based on over 200 signals — things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it,” Pichai said after Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) sarcastically asked about the “little man behind the curtain.”

President Donald Trump talks to media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018, for the short trip to Andrews Air Force Base en route to Philadelphia to attend the Army-Navy Football Game. (Carolyn Kaster / AP)

“And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query. And then we evaluate them with external raters, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines. And that’s how we make sure the process is working.”